Name Pronunciation > Overview

Pronounce any name like an expert.
E-Speech software provides the most accurate name pronunciation available today
for the names of people, businesses, and places in the United States.

Our software pronounces any name - and like an expert.

For over 150,000 names, we have
confirmed that our pronunciation is a pronunciation that would be produced by an intelligent, educated US native speaker of English.

We provide alternate pronunciations for many names with more than one pronunciation

Our
proprietary letter-to-phoneme rule system that we have developed over a decade provides an intelligent pronunciation for any name.

Our online system is easy to use; it is entirely in the cloud and can be accessed from a browser.

See it, hear it. We provide phonetic transcriptions and audio, so you can see the pronunciation and hear it, too.

We offer name pronunciation software for people in the United States.
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We offer name pronunciation for
streets, towns, and points of interest in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
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Our software is also excellent
at pronouncing English words, so it can be used for general text
as well as for name-oriented applications.
E-Speech software and dictionaries can be used either by humans or with speech recognition and with text-to-speech.
It supports all popular phonetic alphabets (IPA, ARPAbet, CPA, SAMPA, HARK) and also "newspaper" phonetics ("oh-BAH-muh") for people, like call-center agents, who would not be expected to know a phonetic alphabet.

Our software will give you unparalleled name pronunciation accuracy for any application:

announcing names at events like commencement

coaching agents in outbound call centers on how to pronounce names of people or places

helping sales persons to pronounce names of customers

brand-naming or word searching: it can help identify what words or names sound like other words or names

speech recognition

the front-end for any speech synthesizer

The software translates input in English orthography
into a phonological representation, indicating phonemes, word-stress, syllable boundaries,
word and phrase boundaries, and optionally, intonation and phrase-stress.

If you input...

Our system outputs....

Name

IPA phonetics

Newspaper phonetics

Gerhardt Lachapelle

'geɪr ˌhɑ:rt lɑ: ʃə 'pel

GAIR-hart lah-shuh-PEHL

Daphne Murtagh

'dæf ni: 'mɚ ˌtɔ:

DAFF-nee MURR-taw

Ravi Gnanadesikan

'ræ vi:
næ nɪ 'de sɪ kən

RAV-vee nan-nid-DEH-si-kuhn

Xingxing Liang

ˌʃɪŋ 'ʃɪŋ li: 'æŋ

shing-SHING lee-ANG

Cafe de Paris

ˌkæ 'feɪ 'dʊ pæ 'ri:

ka-FAY duh pa-REE

Tiburon Grille

'tɪ bə rɑ:n 'grɪl

TIB-buh-rahn GRIL

Cabernet Sauvignon

ˌkæ bɚ 'neɪ ˌsoʊ vɪn 'joʊn

kab-ber-NAY soh-vin-YONE

Bryn Mawr

'brɪn 'mɑ:r

BRIN MAR

Skaneateles

skæ ni: 'æ tə li:z

skan-nee-AT-tuh-leez

In addition, our software provides multiple pronunciations for many names
that have more than one possible pronunciation. For example, "Weinstein" can be pronounced as "WINE stine" or "WINE steen,"
"Migliore" may be pronounced as "mig lee OR", "mig lee OR ee",
"mig lee OR ay", "mil YORE", "mil YORE ee", or "mil YORE ay," and "Cai" can be pronounced as "TSY" or "CHY" or "SY".
This feature is important for speech recognition applications, since they need to link all the pronunciations to the same name.

Our software can be used online or real-time during speech recognition/synthesis transaction processing or off-line to build pronunciation dictionaries that can be incorporated into your ASR or synthesis software.
The software is available as part of the E-Speech synthesizer or as a standalone system.

Use our system in the cloud.

Or if you are a developer,
our software runs on Windows and various Unix/Linux systems
and is easy to integrate with applications.
The standalone version is available as a command-line
executable or as a library/DLL containing C-callable functions.
We welcome customization: we are happy to tailor our software to your
specific needs.